With the ongoing downturn in the economy, consumers have been looking for values and bargains in the purchasing process. Online coupons have become extremely important in marketing almost any product. A dollar amount, percentage off sale or other offers have proved to be attention getters. As you can see in the graph below, many consumers reported new brand awareness, saving money, etc., when finding the coupons or online offers; driving new traffic to these existing markets.

I see online coupons increasing in popularity as consumers remain thrifty even after the economy has started becoming stronger. Online research is now viewed as an extremely important tool in the purchasing process.

Online coupon blogs and websites are becoming popular as well. These sites are usually set up by the establishment’s name, and what the coupon is trying to sell or promote. You either print out the page, or click on a link where you will be sent to the coupon available for you to print. Another popular set up for the blogs is to include the days of the week that the specials are running.

Establishments should keep their websites up-to-date, with the increasing demand for online searching. Your website is the first impression of your business viewed by consumers, so make the experience user friendly. 

Ever since Google established itself as the Big Dog in online search with 35% of the market share in 2001, whenever there has been a new search engine or search technology brewing there has been an expectation (by someone somewhere) that it will be a “Google Killer”. 

Here are a few of the more buzzworthy Google-killers from the last few years:

• March 2006:  Microsoft Live Search
• January 2007:  Wikia Search (Wikipedia’s Google-Killer)
• October 2007:  Yahoo Search Assist (Yahoo’s Flickr Integration )
• July 2008:  Cuil
• March 2009:  Twitter search
• May 2009:  Wolfram Alpha
• June 2009:  Bing
   

In 2010, expect to see even more “killers” in the online world.  Its no longer about who is going to try to overtake Google in search market share…there have been tons of attempts, but nothing has taken hold up to this point. 

Now we are seeing more “killers” in the social media space.  But history has taught us not to attack Google where they dominate – search.  Social Channels play nice with Google when it comes to search.  While many social platforms have developed their own search engine – they still rely on the big  3; make that 2 engines to power the results.  However, there is opportunity to attack Google in other places that can be damaging, like email / Gmail.  Have you heard about Facebook’s webmail that is in development? 

But Google is always ready to pull something from their arsenal - and it is not Microsoft, Facebook, or even Twitter that seems to be on the radar – despite the rollout of Google Buzz, called a Twitter-killer by some.  Rather, we are seeing Google penetrate and gain momentum in other areas like mobile with the Nexus phone (iPhone killer) and Chrome OS Tablet (iPad killer).  This crossover into retail mobile should help Google continue to dominate in the online world. 

Even more interesting to watch will be Google’s foray into broadband with their 1-gigabit-per-second broadband networks.
  

Every online advertiser knows that search engine marketing is a contributor for generating sales, but how do you know if your online campaign is actually producing a return on investment?

Calculating your return on investment (ROI), or rate of return, is not only easy to do, but it can also help you determine how your overall campaign is performing.  ROI can be calculated by using this formula:

ROI = (Revenue - Investment) ÷ Investment × 100

For example, if you generated $3000 in revenue and spent $150 in online advertising, your ROI would be 1,900%.

While attracting searchers to your site is important for branding your business, products and services; generating revenue is really the main objective.  That being said, it is not suggested to completely cease all branding campaigns, as these visitors may convert to customers at a later date.  Try testing different strategies such as, lowering campaigns budgets or excluding geographic areas that generate a large amount of visitors, but do not necessarily result in sales.

I have utilized these suggestions for several clients and as a result, have seen dramatic improvements in not only in the average order value and amount of sales, but more importantly the ROI.  While there is no exact formula for making a campaign perform; testing one strategy is not recommended.  You do not want to automatically deem your campaign a failure if you’re not seeing a positive ROI within the first days or weeks of beginning a new campaign. It can take time to determine which technique works best for your campaign; so keep testing and experimenting.